Beth lies herself down next to him on his bed at some point and she turns her body towards him and tries to sleep. She knows that it will come eventually, but it’s the getting there. She watches his face, and she shuts her eyes when she gets sad from staring at it.
She wakes up with his hands on her: his fingers on her back, and his other hand at her crotch, pushing apart her legs. His fingers, once heavily calloused from the guns and the weights and the sand, are still slightly rough, and she remembers this perfectly: how it felt to have them in here. They cling to the inside of her thigh and knead it, and they brush up against her, and she’s ready almost instantly. She doesn’t know how much of this is Vic, but this must be because he’s nearly real. His finger slips across her. The same moves he always used to use, and she kisses him. She pushes: he used to like that, when she was the aggressor. He could start things, and she wouldn’t touch him, but she would push back with her mouth.
So she kisses him harder. She keeps her eyes closed, because she doesn’t want to know if he’ll be looking at her. He always used to look at her, his eyes open. He said that it made it feel better. More real. This feels real enough, Beth thinks. She pushes him back, his fingers still moving around her, and she slides on top of him. She manoeuvres, and then he’s inside her.
And the Machine is there all the time: that low-level noise that lets them know it’s still there, and that it’s still waiting to be used again. Beth pushes her whole body down to grind herself against him, and it doesn’t take long. She falls off him: in the heat, so sweaty so quickly. She thinks that she’ll have to change the sheets. She doesn’t say anything, and neither does he.
She lies next to him, trying to hear his breathing over the Machine; or maybe the Machine’s noise is his breathing, she can’t be sure. The heat becomes stronger somehow: as if it’s coming up through her body, and she’s making the heat herself, not the burning sun or the holes in the ozone layer that they warned them about for so long. She makes the heat. She feels her head with the back of her hand and can’t tell if it’s a temperature. So she gets out of bed and dresses herself lightly, her swimming costume and some shorts, that’s all. She walks back through the estate – it feels like days ago she was last here, not just earlier this evening – and she finds the beach opposite the stretch of shops where everything is dead and everybody else asleep, and she slides into the water. She swims out as far as she can, until the island is hidden by the darkness: only the blip of lights run across the view. She looks at the water as she treads to stay still: and the ripples on the surface that tell her that the vibrations have followed her even here. She stops and bobs, then sinks. Down. She shuts her eyes. Down. Cold all around her, and she can’t feel the warmth of the outside air, not even slightly.
She thinks that she could stay under: but even as she is thinking it something kicks in and her body writhes and forces her upwards, and she gasps for air when the surface breaks. She’s drifted closer to shore: she can see the estate from here again.
She swims back.